In modern society, the distribution rate of portable terminals has rapidly increased due to convenience and necessity. Accordingly, service providers and terminal manufacturers are providing many supplementary functions to increase the utilization of the portable terminals. The function of character message transmission/reception is one of the widely used functions along with the phone call functions of the portable terminals. Also, in transmitting/receiving a character message, not to mention simply transmitting/receiving a text message, transmitting/receiving an emoticon by using a combination of characters and special characters is frequently made.
However, since a current message composition window of a portable terminal is devised for composition of characters and character strings, there is difficulty in composing an emoticon in the message composition window. When a user is to compose an emoticon presenting a specific shape using characters, he/she cannot accurately determine the position relationship of each character and, because of emoticon peculiarity, he/she mostly presents a special character or a shape in a specific position rather than enumerating characters. Thus, for easy emoticon composition, a cursor should be able to move in up/down/left/right directions; however, it is difficult to move down in the message composition window. Also, the user often enters special characters during emoticon composition. However, regarding a general screen configuration of a special character input window, because the portable terminal shows, by way of one line, a special character edit window, it is difficult to determine which contents are above and below. Also, during special character input, the user primarily inputs frequently used special characters, but there is no function for displaying only the frequently used special characters. Furthermore, the frequently used special characters may be different for each user, but there is no function for accommodating user-level personalization for frequently used special characters.